


Febuwhump 2021 No. 6

by Sapless_Tree



Series: MacGyver Febuwhump [6]
Category: MacGyver (TV 2016)
Genre: Febuwhump, Febuwhump 2021, Fluff, Found Family, Gen, Insomnia, James MacGyver's A+ parenting, Whump, it's really fluffy tho.., macgyver whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-10
Updated: 2021-02-10
Packaged: 2021-03-15 21:20:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,059
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29320794
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sapless_Tree/pseuds/Sapless_Tree
Summary: Febuwhump 2021 No. 6Prompt: insomniaThe dark rings under Mac’s eyes seemed more prominent the longer she looked at him, his ghostly pallor making them that much more pronounced. His eyes were a bit bloodshot-- Riley might have missed it if she hadn’t been looking closely-- and they flitted around, not settling on any one thing for too long.“When was the last time you slept?” She asked.Mac shrugged; Riley didn’t like that one bit.
Relationships: Riley Davis & Angus MacGyver (MacGyver TV 2016)
Series: MacGyver Febuwhump [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2137668
Comments: 14
Kudos: 51
Collections: febuwhump 2021





	Febuwhump 2021 No. 6

**Author's Note:**

> oops all fluff (kinda, is it really a MacGyver fic if Mac isn't suffering at least a little??), anyway yeah this one's a lot softer than what I usually write. So apologies if it sounds funky!

Riley was sleeping peacefully when a shifting body to her right roused her. She and the rest of the team had gone back to Mac and Bozer’s place to decompress after work with some beers and a few hours around the fire pit. It had been an easier day at Phoenix-- no ops, but working in the labs could be just as stressful sometimes.

Matty had gone home once it had gotten late, and the rest of the team decided to crash on the couch together. But Riley could feel Mac getting up slowly, trying not to wake anyone up. 

Once he had gotten quietly up off the couch, Mac wandered outside to the deck. Riley gave it a few minutes before she let herself silently up from the puppy pile. She glanced at the clock. It was nearly four in the morning. Padding silently out onto the deck, Riley found Mad standing there, staring out at the city lights. He looked too awake to have just woken up-- as if he had been awake for a while before having finally gotten up from the couch.

There was a faraway look in his eyes as he gazed out on Los Angeles’s city line; he wasn’t taking in the scenery. It was written all over his seemingly blank face that his mind was a thousand miles away.

Riley approached him quietly but made sure her foot scuffed the ground a few times so that she didn’t startle him. If he had heard her, he made no move to acknowledge her. She cleared her throat quietly in another attempt to get his attention, but again he didn’t so much as flinch at the sound.

She made her way over to him and stood by his side. Riley rested her arms on the balcony’s railing and breathed in the fresh air. 

“Hey, Mac,” she said softly. He jumped but finally turned to Riley as if he’d just noticed her. She could see the dark smudges of sleeplessness under his eyes and a sort of exhausted surprise written on his face. “You okay?” 

Mac huffed out a little laugh, mostly to relieve some of the tension in his body. “Yeah, I’m… how long have you, uh, been standing there?”

“Not long,” she answered. “Lot on your mind?”

“Guess so,” Mac said simply, relaxing his shoulders the rest of the way and leaning a little more on the balcony’s railing. “What about you?” 

“Same as you, I guess,” she lied easily. “Couldn’t sleep. Came out here for some air.” It was quiet between the two for a few moments before Riley spoke again. “So,” she said, “what are you thinking about?”

Mac hummed, keeping his eyes trained on the city lights. “Same old,” he settled on.

“So all the knowledge in the universe, then?” Riley joked. Mac cracked a smile.

“Hardly,” he said, smile still gracing his features. “It’s my dad.” Mac took a deep breath, letting it out slowly, and shifted his weight a bit as his face turned to a more serious expression. “My dad has always been… like this. Everything’s always been a puzzle-- or some kind of lesson-- usually both.” 

Touching a hand to the watch secured around his wrist, Mac continued. “Even if sometimes it took longer to get than it did others, I was always able to figure out what he meant. What he wanted me to do or learn. But _this_? This never-ending spiral of clues that mean nothing and leads that go nowhere. I’m worried that maybe… maybe this is his way of trying to tell me he doesn’t want…” The word ‘me’ hung heavily in the air, unsaid, but understood silently between the two. “...doesn’t want to be found,” he said in a rush after having left the implications unsaid for what felt like far too long.

Riley wasn’t sure what to say-- she’d had her own poor experiences with Elwood, but it wasn’t quite the same. She knew what it was like to have a less-than-stellar father, and she knew the heartache of being abandoned when Jack had left her and Diane. But neither man had ever played mind games like this.

She had heard some stories about James MacGyver. And while Mac tended to recount them fondly, they always sat wrong with Riley. They sounded exactly like something the Mac she knew would do, but then she’d remember that James had left when Mac was still pretty young. In many of the stories, the blond was at most _maybe_ eight or nine, and something just didn’t seem right about an eight or nine-year-old dismantling and reconstructing cars, being allowed explosives, or learning survival skills. 

“Do you really think he doesn’t want to be found?” She asked quietly.

“I don’t know,” he answered, running a hand through his hair. “But I have to wonder… if this search for him will even be worth all the time and energy we’re putting into it. What if we never find him?”

“We’ll find him, Mac,” Riley said. She placed her hand over his and gave him a hard look. A determined one.

“And if we do?” Mac said, finally turning his head to meet her gaze. “What then? There’s no way we can have a normal relationship after all this, right? I’m…” he looked out at the city again, growing quiet for a few moments. “I’m not sure why I’m still looking for him.”

Mac had had this conversation enough times with Jack already to know where it was headed. Jack would say something along the lines of ‘because that’s what family does’ and that would be the end of that.

“You know, I don’t really know why I gave Elwood another chance,” Riley said. “He didn’t deserve it, not after everything. And it definitely wasn’t because I’d forgiven him.” Mac gave her a curious look. “I think… maybe it’s okay not to know _why_ you’re searching for your dad, you know?”

“Not really,” Mac said. He turned his gaze back out to the city line. Riley kept her hand over his, even as they lapsed into quiet. 

The dark rings under Mac’s eyes seemed more prominent the longer she looked at him, his ghostly pallor making them that much more pronounced. His eyes were a bit bloodshot-- Riley might have missed it if she hadn’t been looking closely-- and they flitted around, not settling on any one thing for too long. She recognized that habit easily as Mac thinking; he was always looking around for things to use to help him out on missions, so she assumed it had just become a habit for him to try and take in as much of his surroundings as he could with his eyes when he was thinking. Deeper thought would be marked by the blank stare she’d found him with earlier-- that was when he stopped taking in his surroundings and it was just him and his thoughts. Riley didn’t want to let him get there again, however, so she spoke up again.

“When was the last time you slept?” She asked. 

Mac shrugged; Riley didn’t like that one bit. “I got some sleep on the flight home from our mission today, and I got a couple hours of sleep last night.”

Riley frowned. “You mean the mission in Bulgaria?”

“Yeah?”

“Mac, that was yesterday, not today,” she said. “Well, technically two days ago since it’s early morning now.”

“Oh,” he said simply. It was a soft, sheepish sort of sound. 

“You should probably get some actual sleep,” Riley told him, knowing him well enough to know that by 'a couple hours’ Mac likely meant exactly two hours and didn’t want to make it sound that bad. She wasn’t sure if he’d slept two hours last night or the night before that-- he probably didn’t know either.

“I’ve tried,” Mac said, shoulders slumping a little. “I can’t stop thinking about it all.”

“You think talking about it will help?” Riley offered, but Mac merely shrugged again. He tore his eyes from the city line once more to lock his eyes with hers. He looked miserable.

“I just want to go to sleep,” he said.

Heart aching for her friend, Riley said: “stay right there,” and quietly made her way back into the house. Careful not to wake Jack or Bozer, Riley headed for the linen closet, grabbing a couple of blankets before snatching two of the pillows that had fallen off the couch at some point. She took her haul back out to the deck where Mac had dutifully stayed put.

Laying out one of the bigger blankets on the deck, Riley tossed the two pillows down and laid on one of them, patting the spot next to her for Mac to join her. 

“We’re staying out here?” Mac asked, laying down next to Riley.

“Yeah, why not?” She said as she threw the second blanket over the two of them. 

The two laid there quietly for a few moments, looking up at the stars. They were dulled from the light pollution of the city, but even faint they were still pretty. Riley could feel sleep pulling at her, but a few restless shifts from Mac told her that she couldn’t go off to sleep just yet. 

“Did I ever tell you about the time Jack broke a lamp at my mom’s house?”

A smile crept across Mac’s face. “No, I don’t think so.”

“Well, while Jack and my mom were dating, he came over a lot,” Riley began. “He’d hang out and have dinner with us, and when my mom wasn’t home, I would always force him to play board games with me.”

“Let me guess, you beat him in monopoly?”

Riley laughed. “Of course I did, but that’s got nothing to do with the lamp. See, there was this one day where instead of breaking out the board games, we decided to do Wii sports.” Riley smiled as she remembered that day-- Jack had beat her so many times in the boxing game already, and Riley wanted to pick something she knew she’d win at. “We were doing bowling,” she said.

“I think I know where this is going,” Mac said.

“It doesn’t take a genius to figure it out-- Jack refused to wear the wrist strap, and you know when he gets into a game he gets _into_ it.” Riley remembered him throwing the bowling ball behind him before every turn just to watch the little Mii crowd jump, he claimed it was for luck, but he was still losing sorely. “He got a little _too_ into his swing and the remote went flying across the room. Totally destroyed the lamp next to the TV.”

Mac laughed, just imagining Jack’s famous ‘ _oh-shit_ ’ face when he’d realized what he’d done. 

“I’d egged him on to the game, so I felt like it was just as much my fault as it was his. So instead of telling my mom, the two of us hid the evidence and pinky-swore never to tell her.”

Mac gave an amused hum, and when Riley looked over, she could see that he had finally relaxed and his eyelids were drooping. He wasn’t asleep though, not yet.

“Of course my mom noticed the lamp was missing immediately, but neither one of us said a word about it when she asked. Jack gave her some money and said ‘sorry your lamp went missing, hope you find it.’ And for the longest time, I went on thinking we got away with it. Looking back on it now, I think she probably knew what was up, and just wanted to let us have our little secret together.” 

Giving another glance in Mac’s direction, she found that he’d fully closed his eyes. The corners of his lips were still quirked into a smile-- he was more asleep than awake, but still aware of her words filtering gently into his senses. 

“If you ever noticed,” Riley said, talking quieter, “Jack always wears the wrist strap when he plays now.” 

Mac gave another quiet hum, to assure her he was still listening, but his breathing was evening out as he drifted off to sleep. Riley smiled fondly, both from the reminiscing and from seeing that the blond was finally going to get some proper rest. 

“Night, Mac,” she whispered.

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, so like??? I was pretty sure James left on Mac's tenth birthday, but some sources said that James left when Mac was twelve, so I just picked one (tenth birthdayyyy) and that's what we're goin with.


End file.
